Genders in Gaming Target Audiences.

[Acies]

I was asked to provide a few pointers from personal experience, but managed to find an academic study relating closely to what we are discussing.

So the academia can do no wrong, is that it? I read the paper you linked and I gave my thoughts on it - what I hope are well reasoned arguments. You're now supposed to respond and tell me why I'm wrong, that's how this works. I'm not going to take an academic paper at its word because it is an academic paper.

Not to mention, I didn't ask you to prove that there is misrepresentation in games, I asked you for examples of female-specific values, so the paper is irrelevant. How can you in good conscience say that there are such things if you don't even have any conception of what they are?

Obviously any "personal experiences" I would have provided would have met the same demise as the statistical data just presented before you.

Statistical data? Okay, let's say I pick 20 people at random each from a major city. Ten out of those 20 are criminals, therefore 50% of all people are criminals. Do you have a problem with my conclusion? What's that, are the people I chose not necessarily representative of all people, and was my sample so small that had I picked some other group of 20 people the results would have been completely different? Gee…

Yes, I'm sure they would have met the same demise if you used them to make baseless generalizations like the paper.

Which is why I'd argue that such a misrepresentation would not exist in a game created by a group of females. I'd believe there would be more variations than that, but at least this variation can be factually proven (and actually admitted to being existing in your eyes).

This mindset is known as sexism.

I already linked you a bunch of stuff created by females that is indistinguishable from stuff created by males. Now it's your turn to link me something that is obviously female, or your argument doesn't hold water.

Hahaha, no - they are not well reasoned arguments. They are straw-man arguments. You attribute the represenatation of females to 'laziness'. It is so statistically common that it's not an indication of laziness, but rather a mindset.

So the academia can do no wrong, is that it?

I might ask you the same question in return, can not your personal opinion be wrong?

Statistical data? Okay, let's say I pick 20 people at random each from a major city. Ten out of those 20 are criminals, therefore 50% of all people are criminals. Do you have a problem with my conclusion? What's that, are the people I chose not necessarily representative of all people, and was my sample so small that had I picked some other group of 20 people the results would have been completely different? Gee…

Yes, I'm sure they would have met the same demise if you used them to make baseless generalizations like the paper.

Do you not see how this analogy is wrong for the example at hand? There was a total of 174 notable games released that year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_in_video_gaming). What 'major city' has 174 inhabitants? Going back to the study, picking the 20 most popular games of that year means that you encompass a majority of the gaming market for that year. It seems like quite a logical choice to pick a sample size which allows you to analyze a majority of the market and the exposure, no?

On top of that, this type of study has been successfully repeated 3 other times, by 3 independant researchers (copy-paste from https://www.msu.edu/~pengwei/Mou%20Peng.pdf):

Spoiler below!

Following the female as sex object perspective,
Beasley and Standley (2002) particularly
focused on the appearance of female characters,
using clothing as an indicator of sexuality. They
examined three categories of clothing: sleeve
length, neckline, and lower body clothing. They
also coded body cleavage and breast size of female
characters. Beasley and Standley (2002) found a
significant sex bias in female characters. Of the 597
characters coded, only 82 (13.74%) were women.
A majority of the female characters wore clothing
that exposed more skin than the male characters.
To be specific, female characters were more likely
to be in low-cut clothing and with bare arms than
male characters, and about 41% of the female
characters were big busted. In addition, there
was no difference among different game ratings
(i.e., “E” for ages 6 and older, “T” for ages 13 and
older, or “M” for ages 17 and older), which means
children could see voluptuous women images as
frequently as adults do in video games.
A follow-up study by Downs and Smith (2005)
demonstrated a similar result. They did a content
analysis of 60 video games. Compared to male
characters, females were more likely to be represented
in a hypersexual way: being partially
nude, featured with an unrealistic body image
and shown wearing sexually revealing clothing
and inappropriate attire. Similarly, Haninger and
Thompson (2004) found that in the sample of 81
teen-rated video games, women were significantly
more likely to be depicted partially nude than men.
In addition, there were much more male playable
characters (72 out of the 81 games) than female
playable characters (42 out of the 81 games).

Everyone of those studies pointed at the same results, each with more games in their sample. In return, you provide your own thesis and support it with a non-random sample selection of two games.

I already linked you a bunch of stuff created by females that is indistinguishable from stuff created by males. Now it's your turn to link me something that is obviously female, or your argument doesn't hold water.

I think common sense would dictate that a group of females would not create games in the way described above. I am sorry but I don't think I'll partake in this 'trail of the discussion' anymore, as I can't really feel a meaningful exchange going on.

I think Kman previously raised some interesting points, things like that could stack up to deliver a different experience gameplay-wise :]